As enterprises migrate more workloads to public clouds and adopt
multi-cloud strategies to reduce costs, improve agility and flexibility, the use of cloud computing technology in enterprise applications continues to grow.
However, not all cloud computing applications can bring some benefits. Many IT leaders face the failure of
cloud migration projects because they migrated applications to cloud platforms, only to find that their operating conditions are not as good as on-premises data centers, which leads to reverse migration.
A new study conducted by research firm IHS Markit found that most companies migrate cloud-based applications back to on-premises data centers after failing to see the expected return. In a survey of 350 global IT decision makers, 74% of respondents said they have migrated applications back to their own on-premises infrastructure.
Yugal Joshi, vice president of information technology services at Everest Group, a management consulting firm, said: "When a company repatriates its workload from a cloud platform to an on-premises data center, it usually indicates that there is a problem with the migration."
Experts point out that many cloud migrations are not ideal. After the migration, workloads are expensive and often destructive, and there may be performance issues, additional security risks and work interruptions, as well as the consumption of IT and business resources. As Joshi pointed out: "It is not easy to change the location of the workload, and there is a great risk of migrating the workload."
Cloud migration faces challenges
The failure of many cloud migrations does not surprise Asif Malik, senior vice president and chief information officer of SilkRoad Technology. He said that he had encountered this situation in a company before.
Asif Malik, SilkRoad's senior vice president of technology and chief information officer, said, "We thought that migrating business to the cloud platform would save a lot of costs and get rid of infrastructure management. But we were wrong."
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Malik said: "We have been investing computing resources and storage resources, which increases costs."
In view of the fact that there is no financial benefit from such problems, Malik chose to move the application from the cloud platform back to the company's on-premises data center. In this process, we encountered challenges and took the team about eight months.
Reasons for cloud migration failure
Before enterprises move workloads or complete applications to cloud platforms, they need to consider the challenges they may encounter that hinder the smooth progress of cloud platform migration.
Joshi said this may underestimate performance issues and costs. Companies that move applications out of the cloud platform usually do so after discovering latency issues or increasing security and compliance challenges.
These conclusions are consistent with the results of Fortinet's investigation. According to this survey report, 52% of companies move their workloads from the cloud platform back to the on-premises data center. They said that performance or security issues are the main reason for their decision. Another 21% of respondents cited regulatory issues as a driving factor.
Scott Buchholz, former chief technology officer of the U.S. government and public service departments and national research director of emerging technologies, and executive director of Deloitte Consulting LLC said: "If you consider that companies migrate workloads to cloud platforms and then back, then this is too much. A combination of these factors."
The first factor is seeing higher costs than expected. Some people find that they are not getting the expected uptime from cloud computing providers. There is also some complexity that reduces the speed of their systems.
40% of IT professionals have migrated applications from cloud platforms back to their on-premises data centers, but the result is often costly and destructive.
The second factor is misunderstanding the application and operation. Buchholz said, "Some ultra-large-capacity systems with special technical requirements (such as large-capacity transaction databases) do not work well in the cloud. And some applications are not really connected to other things, they have more connectivity than ever before. Sex and more communication. Therefore, when companies go through all the steps, links, and security, the speed in cloud computing is slower than people think."
The third factor is not knowing what to migrate and what to keep. Malik said that cloud migration mistakes gave him a deeper understanding of migration best practices. He said, "Not all applications are suitable for running on a cloud platform."
In fact, this is exactly what he identified as the main reason for the failure of the data analysis application and he is not ready to take action. According to Malik, the problem started with the decision to simply move the application to the cloud platform, which is a direct improvement and transfer project.
He said: "This application is not a multi-tenant application, nor an elastic application, and it does not make good use of a virtualized environment. Moreover, this application relies on data in the data center, which causes the application to be in the cloud. Is a factor in poor performance in China."
Experts said that this is a typical situation encountered by IT departments. Buchholz added: “They treat the cloud platform as a virtual data center and will not change its operations or processes when migrating to the cloud platform.”
Application evaluation is critical
However, as more and more companies gain experience in cloud migration projects, this situation is changing. IT consultants and researchers said that they see more and more CIOs can better evaluate their local applications to determine which applications can be moved to the cloud platform and run successfully with them, and which should be modernized and moved. In the cloud platform, which ones should remain as they are.
James Fairweather, chief innovation officer of technology company Pitney Bowes, said the company started a transformation plan about five years ago. The company provides customer information management, location intelligence, customer engagement, shipping and mailing, and global e-commerce products. Part of this involves moving workloads and individual functions and services to the cloud platform.
Fairweather said that in order to smoothly transfer workloads to the cloud platform, the company rigorously evaluates applications to determine which applications can be transferred to the cloud platform and which applications need to be optimized for the cloud platform in order to provide Return.
He said: "In all these workload migrations, we are very planned for them." He explained that before formulating the best path, employees will perform security reviews, code testing and other analysis on the application. The company has also invested in new technologies, such as Apigee's automated tools and API management, to ensure a successful cloud migration.
